Precinct 13 (22 page)

Because there wasn’t a better answer, I said, “Yes, sir.”

His black-and-white was parked out front. In special lettering on the door were the words: C
HIEF
OF
P
OLICE
. He grumbled to himself as he made his way to the car and then slammed the door shut before driving off. I watched him go, but he never spared me a second glance.

The door stood resolutely closed. I put my hand on the knob, expecting to find it locked. It twisted open easily. Had he never actually tried the door?

Inside, the room was hushed, as if everyone were holding their breath so as not to be overheard by the police chief. When they noticed it was me instead, noise began to slowly return. I shook my head at all of them: bunch of cowards.

I hung my coat up on the peg and went in search of zombies.

It seemed to be the day for arguments. Jones and Stone were at it in front of the interrogation room.

“When I said be ‘bad cop,’ I didn’t mean that bad,” Jones snarled. He looked more tired and worn-out than usual. He had a long scratch on one cheek, and his usually neatly combed hair was disheveled.

Stone slowly crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I have told you a thousand times. Though the rabbi who created me is dead, I am still oath-bound never to kill. I had nothing to do with it.”

“Well, something happened. He was plenty reanimated when I last talked to him.”

“Maybe he’s allergic to fairy dust.”

As curious as I was about what “fairy dust” might actually be, I might have let them continue to fight. But, they were blocking the entrance. I interrupted with a wave of my hand. “You called?”

Jones’s rage had been so focused on his partner that he looked startled to find me standing there. “Oh, Alex, good. The zombie corpse is inside.”

He stepped out of the way to let me past. Before I went through, I told him, “The chief is pretty mad. He wants to talk to you.”

Jones spat some swearword I couldn’t quite catch, though it sounded foreign, and added, “He’s just pissed because we got called before his guys did. He hates it when the chain of command gets broken.”

I didn’t tell him that I thought it might be more than that this time. Stone, however, used the opportunity to defuse the conflict. “You should go play politics,” she said. “Lay on some more glamour. I’ll drive.”

That seemed to be the right thing to say, because he agreed with a brisk nod. They took off purposefully, leaving me on my own with the dead zombie.

I had never seen a zombie before, but I discovered I had a lot of preconceived ideas about what one should look like. I thought it would be bug-eyed, rotted, and possibly still muttering something inane like, “Braaaaains!”

Instead, the zombie’s body sprawled at the lip of the koi pond. One bare foot dangled in the pool, and curious fish nibbled at the flesh of the big toe. Despite the missing shoe, the corpse had been dressed for a funeral. He was facedown. The suit was split up the back, exposing graying shoulder blades and spine.

I knelt beside the zombie’s head, which was twisted to the side. He looked to be in his late eighties, and exposure to the air had made his skin extra saggy.

His face surprised me the most. He hadn’t just been dressed for a funeral; he’d been prepared for one. The makeup that the mortuary had applied gave his face a plastic sheen. In the natural light of the interrogation room, the rouge made his cheeks and lips a bit gaudy. He had a nearly full head of silver-white hair. I brushed stiffly sprayed stray hairs that had come undone aside to look at his sunken eyes. They were open, glassy, but a faint remnant of humanity remained in the deer-brown depths. I thought he looked nice, like the sort to keep a hard candy in his pocket.

He could be someone’s grandfather.

No wonder the chief was mad. Animating bodies from a cemetery in a small town was bad business. The necromancer or whoever had done this had apparently chosen bodies that weren’t too far decomposed. That meant this man had died recently, maybe even less than a week ago. His family
and friends had said good-bye to this man, grieved his passing, and now he’d wandered into the town’s popular diner.

Not cool.

I pulled the edges of the coat so that they covered more of his body and patted his shoulder gently. We needed to stop whoever was doing this.

Similarly, I could understand Jones’s impulse to be angry at Stone. If I didn’t know better, it would appear as though he’d been pushed. But she would have had to shove him from behind and that was atypical of an angry blow in a fight. No, from the angle of the body, it was clear he’d been walking forward when his legs gave out.

He’d collapsed, plain and simple. His arms splayed in a way that indicated that he had
not
tried to break his fall, either. He’d simply gone down limp, like a rag doll.

I wondered if there was some sort of limit to the edges of magical influence. Perhaps, like a radio-controlled toy, he simply walked out of range and stopped getting the signal.

Or someone had turned it off, like a switch.

Sitting back on my heels, I looked for other clues. I checked the side of his neck near the carotid artery for a puncture wound. I found it, small and neat, and the corresponding drainage hole on the right jugular. The mortician who’d done the embalming was careful and precise.

Somehow, I didn’t quite picture the long-haired, tattooed necromancer being this exact, but I could be wrong. I shouldn’t judge someone by the image they presented to the world. After all, the doctors had been so very wrong about Valentine.

After massaging the skin along the side of the corpse’s abdomen, I placed the time of death sometime after the necromancer
had left my morgue—possibly even as recent as yesterday. This man might not have even had his funeral yet.

Oh, now,
that
was evil.

How upsetting would it be to find out that your dearly departed was seen eating breakfast at Big Tom’s the morning before the funeral?

Pulling myself upright, I hit
REDIAL
on the last incoming call. I didn’t expect Jones to answer, but he did. “This better be good news, Connor.”

“I think whoever animated this corpse is a mortician at a local funeral parlor, or is the friend of one,” I said, and then I explained that I thought there was a strong possibility that this body hadn’t been dead longer than forty-eight hours. I also told him about the findings of the chemicals present on the necromancer’s skin. “I’m no cop, but my instinct is that there’s an accomplice, some relative who works with bodies.”

“Do you think it’s ‘skull girl’ from Twitter?”

I had forgotten about her. “That seems a little casual for a mortician,” I said. Though maybe not if she and the necromancer shared the same worldview, as it were. I reconsidered. “Could be.”

“Well, keep me informed.”

I started to say good-bye, but Jones had already hung up. I’d never get used to how no-nonsense cops could be. Putting my phone away, I sat down on the concrete step in front of where the body sprawled over the lip of the pond.

Water had seeped up the zombie’s pant leg. Crouching on the lip precariously, I lifted his foot up out of the water. I set it gently on the edge. I didn’t know what else I could learn from him, and an autopsy seemed cruel. I was sure his cause of death was already known.

I should probably take him back to the morgue anyway,
to check for signs of zombification. Of course, I had no idea what those might be. For all I knew it was just a spell and a wave of a wand.

Just when I was thinking that I should fetch a sheet or something to cover him with, the tattoo on my arm started to itch and tickle. It started as a tingling in my shoulder and ran all the way to the back of my palm. I braced myself. This had happened right before the dead cow had mooed. I had a very bad feeling that the corpse was about to talk to me.

“M a med merring…”

“What?” I asked.

He said the same thing again only louder, and I suddenly remembered that the mortician would either have glued or sutured the mouth closed. I listened very carefully the third time I asked him to repeat his statement. “You’re a red herring?” I finally asked.

Though I thought there was no way I’d gotten that right, he nodded. “Mmes mis taunting moo.”

“He is taunting moo…I mean, you, or us?”

More nodding and then, “Me mates Menser.”

“He hates Spenser?”

That was all he seemed able to give me. He put his head back down and resumed being dead.

“Thanks,” I said. I scratched at the skin over the snake tattoo absently. It was strange that it didn’t ache as badly as it usually did when the dead started talking. The corpse had been extremely helpful, too, not like Mrs. Finnegan’s odd ramblings or the cow’s undecipherable moo. How often did something just sit up and actually tell you it was a red herring? It was mighty suspicious.

“Are you lying to me?” I asked the body.

Of course, now he had nothing to say.

I told the corpse I’d be right back with a modesty cloth and someone to help move him to the morgue where he could wait safely for his family to pick him up. I had no idea if he could hear me, but Mrs. Finnegan seemed to appreciate it yesterday. Maybe, like her, he’d become more talkative the more time we spent together.

Egads, there was a thought.

At least the cow hadn’t mooed since I separated its head from its body.

I wandered back into the main precinct office, looking for a couple of able bodies. It must have been closer to lunch than I realized because the office was surprisingly empty. I found two uniforms loitering near the conference doorway. I recognized them as the guys Jones had picked to interview the neighbors of Olson. Their heads were together and they seemed to be strategizing about how to deal with Jones’s inevitable reaction to the newspaper’s space alien story.

The taller of the two seemed to be the brains of the operation. His flattop was a mousy-brown that matched his eyes. “Listen, Peterson, we’ve got to strike first. We need to storm into Spenser’s office and demand to know why the techno-wizard didn’t cover our tracks better.”

“Throw Jack under the bus?” Peterson asked. He had sandy hair and a similarly washed-out complexion. “That doesn’t seem cool, Hanson. Besides, it wasn’t his fault. The meme was too strong. I don’t even think an army of glamour-using witches could have stopped that one from getting out;
everyone
reported seeing lights.”

“Did you see the chief this morning? Jones is going to be looking for scapegoats on this one. Neither of us is magical.”

Peterson pursed his lips at the idea. He pointed two fingers
at both his eyes. “But we
see
. We’re sensitive, that counts for something.”

“When cuts come to this department, it’s not going to matter much.”

Peterson shook his head. “We should stick to the truth. The fact that we’re ordinary isn’t why the ‘don’t see me’ failed.”

“What’s a ‘don’t see me?’ ” I asked, forgetting that I was supposed to be eavesdropping.

Hanson started guiltily, but Peterson turned to me and explained, “It’s a spell powder we carry on fact-finding missions. It helps people do what comes naturally—look the other way when weird things are happening.”

Aha! I wondered how things were kept hush-hush when dragons flew overhead and such. “So it’s like that pen they used in
Men in Black
?”

“Well, yeah, except not as dramatic,” he said. He cleared his throat before adding, perhaps for his partner’s benefit, “Obviously, it doesn’t work when there’s buy-in.” Using his thumb, he indicated himself and his partner. “That’s why we’re not affected.”

Hanson added, “The spell can’t make someone forget what they saw, it only heightens the instinct not to get involved.”

“Speaking of getting involved…”

I managed to rope both Peterson and Hanson into helping me arrange transport for the zombie’s corpse, and in the process I learned more about what they’d found out from the rancher’s neighbors.

Because of the sunken auditorium design of the interrogation room, the cops had to haul the zombie’s body all the way up the stairs to the door. Though he’d re-died, the body refused to stiffen, so they hauled him by the arms and legs in a two-person carry.

“You said all the rancher’s neighbors hated him?” I asked from where I held the door open, as they grunted up the incline.

“Yeah, I guess Olson’s organic in a crazy way,” said Peterson.

“And free range,” added the other, as they made it to the top step. “That’s the real problem. His cows routinely wandered into the neighbors’ pastures and caused all sorts of damage. Instead of making nice, he’d get all up in their faces and demand restitution for all the nonorganic feed they’d ingested.”

“Sounds like a pain,” I said.

They settled the corpse into the wheelchair I’d found in a back closet. I wasn’t quite sure why the precinct had it, though Hanson said that sometimes the precog on the team would bring in random things like that. “Yeah,” said Peterson. “She gave me the business card for a tree removal service three days before that big tornado last year.”

“Too bad you removed the wrong tree, huh?” His partner laughed, taking the arms of the chair to wheel the corpse toward the door. The body flopped around disconcertingly, lolling off the arms of the wheelchair like a human-sized sock monkey.

I stopped them for a moment to tuck the modesty sheet around the zombie’s shoulders and thighs. The cutaway clothes the funeral home had given him were worse than a hospital gown for random exposure. The cops watched my ministrations curiously.

I had no comment. After all, I had a lot of respect for the dead. They were my job.

We’d decided that since the zombie’s body was so pliable, the two cops would simply set him into their backseat and drive him to the morgue with the wheelchair in the trunk. I’d head over separately and get a freezer ready.

Both Stone and Devon were waiting for me outside the doors. With the excitement of the zombie, I’d forgotten that I’d made an appointment with them to smash cow heads. I checked my watch. Miraculously, I was only a few minutes late.